


Miasma

by thebeholding



Series: What Lies Beneath [1]
Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Because it's in the endgame baby, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Mental Health Issues, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Sort of? It's the Pale what can I say, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:40:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28725999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebeholding/pseuds/thebeholding
Summary: Pale Overexposure. It’s acute now, but should fade over the next few moments.This is why I tried to keep you away from it, Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor.
Relationships: Harry Du Bois & Kim Kitsuragi
Series: What Lies Beneath [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2105877
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	Miasma

**Author's Note:**

> Please be warned, there is a lot of talking about mental illness, PTSD, and suicide. Also, hand wavy dissociative disorders. I myself am an OSDD system, this is not meant to be an accurate take on DID or any similar disorder. It's "fantasy mental illness".

Snow has begun to fall. It settles like ash, dusting the surroundings with the cold touch of Revachol’s despondence. 

Your ears are still ringing. The Pale lingers, tangible and cloying in the aftermath of the Latitude Compressor. Existential dread made physical in the form of sound - _radio chatter, numbers, anodic dance music, a rumbling from deep within the church’s hallowed ground, farther up down sideways than humans can comprehend. Immeasurably measurable, 2 mm._

A 2 mm hole in reality, a hole in Harry’s hip, or his shoulder, or his hip _and_ his shoulder. You can, will, smell the faint smoke of fresh gunfire, a hazy sketch of a firefight yet to come. There’s a scream, familiar to you because you’ve heard it every night for the past week from the room that adjoins yours. A warm gun in your hand, not yours, a _NO_ tinged in pain panic fear, sounds like a nightmare repeated in on itself endlessly, a hundred sleepless nights and pounding on a door in Jamrock and shouts of _SHUT THE FUCK UP PIG FUCK DU BOIS_. Harry pulls a bullet out of the brainstem of a skull like it’s a sacred rite, and it’s yours- your bloated week old corpse instead of the mercenary. Your grey matter sprawls around your head like a halo. Something whispers in the shell of your ear, and it sounds like _communism_. 

Pale Overexposure. It’s acute now, but should fade over the next few moments. 

_This is why I tried to keep you away from it, Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor._

You shift slightly, blinking past the strange feeling. Your dirty glasses are making it very difficult to focus, but you don’t dare wipe them. Not while Harry is gesturing at Ruby with almost gut wrenching desperation, as if his entire life rests in her hands, instead of the other way around. You feel as though you are miles away from what is happening, useless and alone in the corona of humanity’s tenuous existence. 

There’s a gun in her thin, white ( _snow, ash, Pale_ ) hands. Her knuckles stand out, pinpricks of muted pink punctuating her terrified grip. 

You should be doing something- maybe pulling out your own weapon, or closing the distance like the other lieutenant is. Harry is drifting closer to Ruby, within touching distance now. His mouth is moving, and he’s shaking as he tumbles through what is probably more incomprehensible Du Bois can-opening. He’s almost sickeningly earnest- you’re reminded of him falling to his knees in front of Her Innocence in the Dolorian Church; the visions of it bleed over and make you see double. He has the same baleful look on his face now as he did then. 

A flash, and a belated deafening noise adds to the already painful cacophony in your head. Your eyes are drawn instantly to the source, the explosion of blood and gore that just occurred in front of you. Ice creeps into your veins, the world slows to a crawl. The whole coast holds its breath- _It’s so quiet, even the waves have stopped their ceaseless crashing on the shore. A woman with a sword hums soundlessly, another with cataracts shakes her head in despair_ \- it’s frozen in shock, stuck in the thick miasma of Pale and Ash and Martinaise. Pure, undiluted hopelessness. Ruby’s body falls like a marionette; the strings that tie every living thing to this isola giving way to the inevitable pull of gravity and the absence of breath in her soul. 

Abruptly, time snaps back into motion. It’s still cold. How many more will die today? This feels like a beginning, not an end. You’re not sure you’re ready to die, and you’re even less sure you’ll be able to hide that fact.

You can’t look away from the mess- red, white, and black. Gore never looks as red as you think it should. Bile creeps up in your throat unbidden, and you barely manage to swallow it back down- the symmetry of it almost ludicrous in its cruelty. 

Earlier events twine into the present, like the perfect folding mechanism of the Phasmid ( _the what?_ ). You feel yourself struggle not to vomit, barely keeping composure, and you see Harry do the same, days ago, at the same time. The corpse creaks in the tree, mocking you. _You will soon be doing the same as him._ You smell ammonia. 

The air is very still, and the ash still falls. 

“Oh god.”

His voice finally interrupts the stillness of the Play- _the week loops in on itself, kaleidoscopic, over and over, a Moralintern bureaucrat describes the lynching to them in the past, describing this moment in the future. Like a play. It seems surreal. Too quiet for the violence the moment contains._ Your gaze finally flickers towards Harry, away from the corpse. 

He had been standing so close to her. His hands are still extended in worshipful supplication, palms up in surrender, his sallow face caked in brain and flayed skin. He can’t seem to tear his eyes away from the mutilated body. A sliver of gore drips out of his unkempt hair, splattering lifelessly to the ground. 

Your mouth goes dry, and you have to swallow another wave of nausea. Harry’s horrified, stricken expression finally gives you the push you need to move, face schooled into a professional grimace instead of broadcasting the gnawing dread you can’t seem to shake.

You have both seen your fair share of horrors in the years of protecting and serving the citizens of Revachol. It was impossible not to. Officers of the RCM can only allow themselves a moment to grieve. The foot soldiers of the city mourn not only the victims, but the pieces of themselves- the parts that once hoped to make a difference- that have died over the years. Every shift another step in an endless funeral vigil, the punch of your time card clangs unending, the dirge of the dying city and its people. You are able to compartmentalize, put the traumas into a box that is only allowed to bleed out into the pages of your journal after your one cigarette. If you’re unlucky, the events of the day will fester in your dreams.

Harry should be able to do so as well. He has almost two decades under his belt at the RCM. Even without the dulling crutch of alcohol and narcotics he should be able to carry on, if only for just a couple more hours. His rank attests to that fact, as does his record.

But the man isn’t moving. 

You step between him and the corpse, blocking the worst of the view. 

“Detective,” your voice is quiet, but firm. 

The larger man’s gaze finally focuses on your face, and alarms begin to go off in your head. Thoughts spark faster than you are able to comprehend, still off kilter. The Pale Emitter, the exhaustion, the endless sleepless nights compound upon one another until you’re barely able to see straight, let alone reason.

Ideas like _trauma and stressor disorder_ flit through your thoughts, and the flickering, panic effused memory of your bumbling partner sticking the service pistol that you had just handed over to him into his mouth in a practiced motion, so easy that it almost seemed like it belonged there. 

“Harrier.” You snap your fingers urgently, just as he once did to catch the attention of the Paledriver. Your gut roils at the uncanny similarities. 

_Is it all really connected? Is there something we missed that may have prevented this?_

You don’t appreciate the connotations that your thoughts are pointing you to, but you don’t have the volition to ignore them completely. Harry is so still that flakes of snow cling to his lashes. It isn’t like when he normally… steps away from reality for a moment. Even then, the man is animated- he is always absurdly full of strange esoteric posturing and out of left field, otherworldly insight that makes your spine tingle with the impossible implications of it.

Right now, he seems empty.

Another thought flares.

_Dissociative disorder._

It’s stolen from you before you can grasp it fully, leaving just a half realized idea: he is unwell.

You’re missing something. Something diseased and momentous lurks behind the larger than life personality, the retrograde amnesia, the suicidal bender, the self destructive behavior. Something hidden even behind the little pieces you know of the man’s sordid past. There’s a gaping hole ( _a 2 mm hole, the end of all things oozing out and contaminating all that it touches_ ) in your idea of who Harry Du Bois is. 

A nebulous memory flits through the fog. Screams from the adjoining room in the dead of night. The jagged, unconscious sobbing. A man who seems to be in too much pain for it to have reasonably originated from a bad divorce. 

The Pale contamination still lingering within you Swallows the flashes of conceptualization greedily, leaving you in the dark once again.

Maybe it was presumptuous of you to think you knew anything. It had only been a handful of days, and humans were frighteningly complex at the best of times. 

You’re pulled away from your tangential thoughts ( _Is this what it’s like in your head, Harry?_ ) by the detective finally moving. His body is trembling almost worryingly, any visible skin slick with sweat despite the biting cold. He fumbles through his jacket and pulls out a bottle of Commodore Red.

When had he gotten that? There’s a dim recollection of a dingy bathroom in the decrepit apartment building, and that swaggering Jamrock shuffle. 

“What are you doing, Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor.” Your voice finally sounds like your own again, clipped and in control. Your errant thoughts have been wrangled, and censured. Into the box they go. “I understand that this is difficult, but you need to get ahold of yourself.” 

When Harry looks at you again, caressing the bottle of alcohol like an old lover, it’s like looking at a stranger. 

You remember, distantly, once upon a time in your youth ( _ancient history, rarefied past that is irradiating some poor soul travelling through the Unknown_ ), going to a dilapidated zoo in Revachol West before it was shuttered. There had been a large, leaking tank there, more akin to a watery grave with its algae tinted water than a habitat. A shark lazily floated past, and you had hated the way the animal looked at you, with no emotion in its dark eyes. It featured in your nightmares longer than you care to remember or admit.

Harry, the man you have come to know ( _to care about, even_ ) has that same blank look in his eyes right now. And that awful Expression he had finally banished earlier that very day creeps back onto his face like a malignant cancer. 

“What does it look like, baby?” Harry chuckles low in his throat, devoid of mirth and flashing too many nicotine stained teeth. “I’m getting my drink on.” His voice growls deeper than you’re used to hearing, rumbling from unnaturally deep within himself. 

A thought finally connects.

That voice.

The hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The soulful, unfamiliar voice of a man pouring his grief out through karaoke, so undeniably _Harry_ and yet so far removed. The worried looks shared between his forgotten squad mates when they think no one is looking. The Man With Sunglasses rubbing his face with his hands as the song winds down. Dread twists knots in your stomach as Harry uses his teeth to uncork the bottle, spitting it to the side without care.

“Wait.” The corner of Harry’s mouth, still bearing The Expression, twitches downward into a scowl. His eyes narrow, but he does as you direct. 

“Unless you want to be cleaning up Harry boy’s fucked up disco brains off your jacket, you’re gonna let me handle this.” There’s weight to his words. The detective’s flinty gaze flickers to Ruby’s still warm gun, then back to you. 

“Who are you?” You nearly flinch at the sound of your own voice, tight with barely repressed emotion. So unprofessional. You clench your teeth to keep it all inside. 

_Something primal. Self loathing. Pure id._

He doesn’t bother to answer, tipping back the bottle and drinking so deeply that the wine drips down his chin, gleaming darkly. It looks like blood in the low light. There’s already so much red on his face, but he casually adds more, disregarding your calculating gaze and the cooling body lying haphazard on the ground. 

After a long eternity, he lowers the bottle and pulls some sort of trash he had collected out of his pocket, letting it flutter out of his hand and into the gentle Martinaise wind. It’s too small and quick for you to see with your thrice damned binoclard vision, but you think you smell the imperceptible scent of fruit in the air as it blows away. 

Faint apricot, and the copper tang of blood.

When you turn your gaze back to Harry, he’s looking quietly at the body. The Expression has faded, his eyes shimmer with something you can’t quite read. 

“She left.”

Something so close to comprehension grips your chest in a vice grip, icy and painful. The warm thudding of your heart from residual adrenaline chases away the tenuous thread, leaving you hollow. 

He shudders, breath catching painfully in his chest. Distantly, a gust of wind tears shingles off an old roof. 

When he begins to cry, the skies open up and flood the streets of Revachol with his tears. Each hitching sob is echoed in a peal of thunder.

You shiver as he helps you carry the body.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote most of this at work, so I might have to clean it up a bit later. This is an AU, though it's not too obvious in this work. Kim/Harry endgame though because I'm a moron. It's complicated.


End file.
